After the rain: the gnawing of crickets,

sun-scorched leaves.

A bird harrowing far away inside

the drier hemisphere of your mind.

Earth wet with the after rain

dankness of blessing.

Snails sliming slowly through the thick

forest of this cerebral haven;

their silvery trail said to hold healing within.

You watch it grow like shrub

in the fertile ground of your heart-

days well spent, shivering in the dew

and drop of Golden Hill’s schizophrenia-

the glitter of this bipolarity

lighting dark days.

-Nicholas Damion Alexander

I live in a world of peace. A world where people tolerate each other in spite of racial or religious differences. It’s not John Lennon’s imaginary world where religion has been disestablished. No. It is a world where people accept each other even though they hold innate or inherited dissimilarities. It is a real world. Not just a figment of my imagination. Though it was created by my imagination.

“How did I create this world?” You may be asking I’ll tell you.

We’ve all watched or heard of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp right? Well, this Eastern folklore became my very Western reality. This may sound cliche but it all started one day at the beach.

You see, I live on the small Caribbean island of Jamaica, the “land of wood and water”. This place was not so named by The Tainos centuries ago for no reason. Jamaica is a mountainous land space full of forests, beaches and rivers. I live in a place called White Horses, next to Belvedere and Duhaney Pen, in the parish of St. Thomas. Even in the 21st century St. Thomas is still the most underdeveloped parish in Jamaica. We Jamaicans call it ‘bush’. In fact, there’s actually a place called “Bushy Park” not too far away. There’re many “Bushy Parks” in other parishes by the way as every country probably has several places with the same name.

I love to jog on the beach to keep my fitness level up especially since I have now recently entered my forties. But on this particular day, it was just a typically sunny Sunday morning when many people are preparing for or headed out to church. Jamaicans love themselves some church. Those of them who are not Rasta and smoking weed, that is. And even then, many still alternate between the two.

I don’t.

I just live and pray for peace. And the way I see it, religion or escaping your problems in substances don’t solve them. Anyway, too many people fight over religion. Look at the East. Even in Jamaica, people will argue all day everyday about what to believe. Even people who claim to believe the same religion. 

I recall, as a youth in my twenties, doing so with my best friend. We begged to differ on almost everything though we both claimed to be ‘Christians’. If I said, “When we die we are conscious of our eternal destiny.” He’d say, “No, we die and are unconscious until the Day of Judgment.”

And we both had our scriptures as proof. It was all down to who argued better. And who argued better was often down to who remained calmer. I always lost my temper and the debate. So I started to avoid the debate. As I got older I started to lose in interest in the whole thing, especially when you realize that so many denominations use the same book to say different things. Then there are the Muslims and Jews at it over Jerusalem. As I got older I learnt that it all stemmed from different interpretations of the same book.

Eventually, I grew disinterested in the whole thing though I still believe in God or some sort of Divine Creator. To me, it just makes more sense. Now though, I’m not so sure if some of those things were anything but men’s musings. Especially after studying philosophy and theology I’ve become even more convinced this is so.

Race is the next issue. Even though there’s no real evidence that men of old(before the Renaissance) engaged to outright and outrageous acts of racism, it is well-documented that they have in recent times(since the African Slave Trade). Since then, the Black race especially has experienced overt acts of racial discrimination and oppression, if not from all other races, surely from Europeans and their descendants. Even since Emancipation and Independence in various former colonies, including Jamaica, the man of darker complexion has seemingly gotten the ‘bad end of the stick’. 

Luckily for me, Jamaica has exemplified its motto-“Out of Many, One People” by having a fairly perfect race relation history. I am a perfect example of this, mixed with Portuguese on my father’s side and Afro-Hispanic on my mother’s side. Many Jamaicans have similar mixtures though most have a high concentration of African heritage than I may have. It’s like I once said to a duo of Korean and Nigeria students that interviewed me for their graduate research-“People, for the most part, just choose partners based on some other preference other than race in Jamaica.”    

So I’m jogging on this fateful Sunday morning on the beaches of White Horses where I bought a property overlooking the sea. Sunday morning is my relax time. After my jog I’ll receive my newspaper. Later in the afternoon, I’ll prepare for work. I teach Religious Education at a high school nearby.

This may sound preposterous but...that’s when it happened. I saw a lovely blue object washed up on shore at my feet. I like to run where the waves can reach my feet. It was an ancient-looking lamp as blue as the waves themselves, as blue as the sky. It had intricately designed floral patterns of gray and brown all over it. It looked like something from Arabian mythology.

It was.

I took it up and brushed it off(it was covered in the pearl-white sands of the beach). I was hit by one of the many heavy waves that bounce against the wild shores of St. Thomas, the most notoriously rough waters in the world. I fell and almost lost grip of my gift. But I held on, having a feeling that I had in my possession something life-changing.

At the time I didn’t know it was world-changing.

I got up and cleaned it off again. That’s when it happened. A bluish-grayish smoke emitted from the muzzle of the shell-shaped ornament. My vision was clouded by the density of the substance. When the smoke cleared I saw an apparition before me. It was a lovely figure in the form of a woman, just as depicted in the famous sitcom, “I dream of Genie”, except this woman was as black as onyx, shining ebony in the Sunday morning sun. She wore a thin pleated shirt that showed off her wide hips and a short blouse that revealed her deep-cut navel.

I was startled and stood frozen for a few seconds but her beauty and sweet tone of voice eased my fears in an instant. 

“Thank you for freeing me from the curse of the lamp. Your wish is my command.” She uttered confidently, flashing her thick bronze locks.

She then revealed to me that she was a good jinn or angel that was imprisoned in the lamp by the black king of the djinns, Al-Malik al-Aswad, from as far back as ancient times in the faraway lands of the East. The lamp was cast into the sea and set adrift for distant oceans to ensure she would not interfere in the evil plan to divide mankind along the crucial lines of race and religion. These divisions, she explained, did not exist before. 

I immediately thought of the Bible stories of Daniel and Joseph living in Babylon and Egypt who were allowed to practice their separate faiths in those Eastern lands.

“Oh so this explains the diabolic change!” I thought.

I proceeded to pronounce my wish: that people would accept each other in spite of their different religions and races. That a man would marry a woman and not care if she believe something else or was of a darker hue. 

“This will be as you wish when you awake tomorrow morning.” She boldly affirmed.

Since then, there has been no reported cases of racial or religious conflict anywhere in the world though other ‘minor’ conflicts occur, like crimes of passion and corruption. It’s not a perfect world yet but my wish came true; and I have a lovely, dark, ageless wife to show for it.   

Nicholas Damion Alexander is a Jamaican writer living in the USA. His poems, stories, reviews and articles have appeared in print and online newspapers, magazines, journals and anthologies in Jamaica, the wider Caribbean, USA, UK, Europe and the Pacific.

After the rain: the gnawing of crickets,

sun-scorched leaves.

A bird harrowing far away inside

the drier hemisphere of your mind.

Earth wet with the after rain

dankness of blessing

Snails sliming slowly through the thick

forest of this cerebral haven;

their silvery trail said to hold healing within.

You watch it grow like shrub

in the fertile ground of your heart-

days well spent, shivering in the dew

and drop of Golden Hill's schizophrenia-

the glitter of this bipolarity

lighting dark days.